Don't remove whitespaces after pressing Enter

[DoctorRainer]

It's convenient to navigate indented code, it's better to implement an option that allows you to keep trailing spaces. Removing trailing spaces interferes with indentation and navigation

[DoctorRainer]

Fixed with (not quite but I'm trying to come up with a better way):

"S-ret" = "open_above"
"ret" = "open_below"

[DoctorRainer]

No, it doesn't work actually and I don't know how to fix it with shortcuts

[pascalkuthe]

It's intended behavior and matches other editor like vim. I don't think adding an option for this is worth doing.

[DoctorRainer]

@pascalkuthe how to achieve this then? Vim is configurable enough for achieving this

[the-mikedavis]

Also see #5159 which discusses this. I don't understand when keeping trailing whitespace is a good thing, so I'd prefer we don't make this configurable.

[goyalyashpal]

If this is meant for manual editing then a snippet makes way more sense than this.

👍 nice

oh, and so, snippet too does have placeholder right? i.e. these won't be trailing in there?

#395

[pascalkuthe]

Actually in your case it looks like adding in the trailing commas would be enough to fix most of these cases.

But yeah snippet tabstops have placeholders that get automatically removed when you jump to them so that would be the most useful fix for this usecase (that is still wip, #9801 contains most of the heavy lifting).

[goyalyashpal]

trailing commas would be enough to fix most of these cases

yeah, but things like yaml, toml, etc don't allow trailing commas. but i get ur point :-)

[raum-dellamorte]

Rewrite: I have all whitespace rendered and I combine that with whitespace indented but otherwise blank lines to help my eyes follow indentation level vertically. I also pre-indent lines while I plan what exactly I need to put there. For keeping my spaces that I enter manually, there IS a way to turn off formatting by setting [editor] auto-format = false, which solves half of my problem. For the other half, I forked the repo and added a config option to not remove automatically inserted whitespace used for indentation when either entering normal mode or proceeding to another new line without having typed anything. Based on this discussion, a pull request seems unlikely to be approved.

[bcspragu]

Just a (belated) data point here: Markdown can behave differently in the presence of trailing space, e.g.

thing1
thing2

with no space can be rendered as

thing1 thing2

But with trailing space after thing1 will render as:

thing1
thing2

[DoctorRainer]

@the-mikedavis formatters already remove all trailing spaces but when helix removes it after pressing Enter, it interferes with text editing. You can't just enter + move_line_up, you need to insert like 3 tabs or something or to exit to normal mode to execute a command

[DoctorRainer]

Pretty much yes, you need to needlessly switch modes and execute commands instead of just navigating up. And you don't really get anything, because formatter removes trailing spaces anyways

[pascalkuthe]

Insertmode is only intended for temporary inserting short burst of text. Helix is fundamentally a modal editor. We are not interested in support non-modal or semi-modal usecases or reducing mode switching

[DoctorRainer]

I mean removing trailing spaces has nothing to do with being a modal editor. A modal editor can pretty much have any of these 2 behaviours. Dealing with trailing spaces is a work of a formatter generally

[pascalkuthe]

, you need to needlessly switch modes and execute commands instead of just navigating up

insertmode is not meant for navigation

[the-mikedavis]

Relatively few languages have a formatter. We can't delegate trailing whitespace handling to formatters

[slembcke]

So I've been really trying out Helix today to finally replace VSCode, and having to manually re-add the indentation every time I move the cursor is driving me nuts. I honestly feel like I might be missing something fundamental about how other people edit their code.

For example If my insertion cursor was already at the end of a block and I wanted to insert a new one, I'd hit <return> <return> <up> and start typing the new block to go in the middle. Helix immediately strips the indentation so you can't do this, and you end up having to mash <tab> a bunch of times to get it back manually. Same issue when moving the cursor around willy nilly. Helix mostly figures it out for C code if I toggle in and out of insert Mode using o, I, etc, but why do you have to do this? The other 10% of the time it's wrong anyway and still requires manual indentation :(. For a lot of other files like plain text or templates with mixed content in them it basically doesn't work at all, ever. Lastly, this is maybe a personal thing, but I find it extremely distracting to edit code without whitespace around it. (newlines to separate separate blocks of code, and indentation that matches where it will go)

I've gotten very used to just leaving blank lines indented to the proper depth because then there's never any surprises about where the cursor will be indented to on any given file when you move the cursor. A few extra (otherwise invisible) bytes is a small price to pay for that editing convenience. Having the proper indentation baked in is a godsend when stuck using a "dumb" editor too.

I really expected trim-trailing-whitespace = false to fix the issue, but that only prevents it from stripping indentation on save. What's the rationale to allow indentation to be saved if it's so aggressive at removing it in the first place? Other editors I've used in the past 20 or so years all either work this way OotB or at least can be configured to. Am I missing something terribly obvious? With the default config at least I'm having to manually fix indentation issues constantly many times an hour.

Honestly, sans this one issue Helix seems to work great. It's lightning fast, well organized, and doesn't keep trying to convince me I need more AI. Would be a shame to drop it now for just this reason. :-\